Kansas City has been dubbed Cowtown. Love it or hate it this is part of who we are. We have a plethora of world class steak houses, but this blog will not (yet) attempt to find and review them. My goal is to find the best places (big or small, upscale or blue collar) to get a great steak for a good price every day of the week.

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Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Fric & Frac: Tuesday Steak Night

This is my first post as a non-law school student! It has no relevance for finding red meat awesomeness but I wanted to brag.

My most recent Kansas City steak night adventure was to an old Kansas City neighborhood bar and institution: Fric & Frac.

Fric & Frac has been around since 1976 dutifully serving the
KU Med/39th street crowd beverages and food for 36 years. This is the
only Tuesday steak night that I am aware of (right now) in the metro.

Fric & Frac is located at the corner of Genessee and 39th St in Kansas City Missouri. It is a wonderful bar that is famous for its cheese steaks and burgers. This is a great place to shoot pool, have a beer and some tasty food. If you haven't been to the 39th street corridor in a while you should it is loaded with great restaurants, bars, boutiques, cafe's and fun stores.

I was leaving work and had been eating tacos for days. I had one of my favorite taco places cater my graduation party on Cinco de Mayo, and had tons of left overs. Pastor tacos with pineapple are one of my favorite foods, but the thought of another taco was frightening.

Not being able to eat anymore Mexican I decided it was time to return north of the boarder for some classic American food. What is more American than a juicy steak? My dining companion and I sat down and looked over the menu. Not sure why, I did I know what I was going to get.

The deal here is a 10 oz. Kansas City Strip Steak with a side and salad. I opted for the baked potato. Also available are fries or steamed veggies. Not being a fan of low carb diets, a classic baked potato with my steak sounded heavenly.

While my dining partner perused the menu we ordered a pitcher of PBR. I'm not a regular PBR drinker, but this time it hit the spot. It was crisp, refreshing and cheap. They didn't have any great drink specials when we were there. They do have 2 for 1 drinks for happy hour from 3-6 p.m., and half off of all wells after 9PM. If you plan your steak night properly you can take advantage. Unfortunately I arrived at 7:15 p.m. and left at 8:45 p.m.. The PBR pitcher was $9.00, had I opted to order by the glass it would have been $3.10. They had glasses of wine for $5.00 as well.

After we had some suds, my dining companion figured out what sounded good and we went on to order.

The salad came out quickly. It was your classic house salad, iceberg lettuce, shredded purple cabbage, shredded carrots, black olives, onions, tomato, and a surprise of garbanzo beans. I ordered Italian dressing on the salad. My dining partner and I ended up in a debate on whether anything but ranch or blue cheese dressing is appropriate with a steak. While I normally prefer a ranch dressing on my salad when having a steak, this time I decided against it. Let me know if you think I committed a cardinal sin.

Onto the steak! This was a surprisingly excellent steak. It was obviously a choice cut of KC Strip steak and was lean yet well marbled. It had the perfect amount of fat topping the upper portion of the steak. You could tell it had been cooked on a flat electric skillet with butter on it. I prefer less buttery flavor, but the buttery flavor was not so dominate to overpowered the steak's natural flavor like you get in some dinners (looking at you Denny's).

The steak was also fresh never frozen and hand cut, not prepackaged, which gets high marks in my book. Frozen steak is an abomination against all that is good an holy in the world. As always I ordered the steak medium rare. This came out exactly how I believe medium rare ought to be. It was brown on the outside, pink most of the way through and slightly red in the middle.

This steak did not have any crust built up around the outside, they appeared to only cook the steak in butter. I personally like some cracked pepper and kosher salt on the outside. Overall the steak was excellent, especially when comparing to other steaks I've had at other steak nights.

I will only briefly address the baked potato. It tasted like a baked potato, classic steak side. Done.

While this blog is dedicated to steak, my dinner companion ordered a Philly cheese steak that deserves honorable mention. Fric & Frac has amazing cheese steaks. While they don't use the same super high quality french bread that is mandatory on every Cheese Steak if you are in Philadelphia, Fric & Frac does offer a cheese steak with Philly cream cheese. I had a bite and wow is it good. I will go back and eat one another night (or possibly another afternoon) when I have not stuffed myself full of a KC Strip. If you are there on a non steak night do treat yourself to one of these it is quite choice.

The service here was great once they realized we were there. It is a seat yourself place so you need to catch the servers eye so they know you are there, found that one out the hard way. But the service was great, the server was quick with suggestions and offered bits of great information about the menu.

To sum it up this Kansas City steak night adventure:

Restaurant: Fric & Frac

Location: 1700 West 39th Street, Kansas City, MO 64111

Phone Number: (816) 753-6102

Ambiance: Fun bar atmosphere

Steak: Excellent

Sides: Classics with no frills

Service: Good

Philly Cheese Steak with cream cheese - worth the heart attack

Fric & Frac does not have a website I can direct you to. If you're craving a steak on a Tuesday night this is a great place to go.

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Steak Nights

About Me

I have always lived in meat centric cities:
Kansas City - Best BBQ in the world, and dubbed cowtown.
Memphis - Close second for BBQ.
Rio de Janeirio - churrasco, beef on swords eaten slowly so every bite is delicious and tender.
Finally Buenos Aires - the best steaks in the world.
Therefore I love to eat steaks and this gives me an excuse to do it!